Guest Editors’ Introduction

Abstract

During the past 30 years, there has been a growing discussion of how women's lived experiences have been absent from much of the research on issues related to women's lives (see, for example, Harding, 1987;Nielsen, 1990;Riger, 1992). Theory in the social sciences has often developed without the benefit of women's voices on their experiences. Hare-Mustin and Marecek (1994) describe ways in which models developed from the experiences of men have been assumed to be universal models of human behavior and functioning, a process of ignoring how gender may operate as a key variable, which they term beta bias. They also critique research that focuses exclusively on exaggerating gender differences, what they call alpha bias. The result of such critiques has been a call for research that uses more complex notions of gender-understanding its intersections with race and socioeconomic status, for example-and that places women's experiences at the center of the formulation of questions, design of methods and measures, and interpretation of results.Two special issues of Violence Against Women-Bringing Women's Voices to the Center: Innovative Methods in Violence Against Women Research, Part I (October) and Part II (November), with a few articles opening the December issue-were conceived to highlight methods used in research dedicated to putting women's voices at the center of inquiry in studies of violence against women. Although it would seem logical that in research on violence against women the voices of women would be heard, this is not always the case. We have documented (Williams, 2004) that violence-against-women research may be designed without benefit of any discussions with women about their lived experiences or with the practitioners who work in the field with survivors of violence. Surveys, questionnaires, and interview and focus group protocols may be designed and carried out far away from the real lives of women.These special issues begin to remedy the limitations of some of the research on violence against women by including articles that